Capital City Comic Con In Austin Eschews Part Of Promotional Campaign Featuring Giant, Heaving BoobsHere for the apology. Here and here for write-ups on what happened. The story isn't that a convention did something stupid or that their initial defense was "hey, part of shows," or even that a lot of people are tired of this kind of thing -- people have been yelling at conventions to stop doing casually offensive stuff for decades now -- but that there is such an obvious mass of people that won't accept this in the audience now that this kind of acting out feels isolated in a way, it stands out a bit more than it did during the day where you could walk around and keep count Legolas Vs. Gimli at Helm's Deep style who saw more things you'd never expose your friends to that weren't acclimated to comics' pernicious, underlying misogyny. This isn't a now versus then thing in any other way, though, I should say; it was always wrong, and always made people feel uncomfortable. People that leer was never a market segment.

I will be interested to see how far this goes, as someone that has exactly zero interest in the playing-out aspects of cons, because I think there may be some conversation to be had over a lot of expresions at cons that aren't quite this open to slam-dunk criticism but are still things that might make some folks uncomfortable. It's worth keeping an eye on. I also wonder if the widespread availability of straight-up porn on the Internet has diminished the audience for sexualized mainstream entertainment to the point this has become a different conversation as well.